5.2. Troubleshooting the Installation Process

5.2.1. Boot Configuration

If you have problems and the kernel hangs during the boot process,
doesn't recognize peripherals you actually have, or drives are not
recognized properly, the first thing to check is the boot parameters,
as discussed in Section 5.1, “Boot Parameters”.

If you are booting with your own kernel instead of the one supplied
with the installer, be sure that CONFIG_DEVFS is set in
your kernel. The installer requires
CONFIG_DEVFS.

Often, problems can be solved by removing add-ons and peripherals, and
then trying booting again.

If you have a large amount of memory installed in your machine, more
than 512M, and the installer hangs when booting the kernel, you may
need to include a boot argument to limit the amount of memory the
kernel sees, such as mem=512m.

5.2.2. Interpreting the Kernel Startup Messages

During the boot sequence, you may see many messages in the form
can't find something, or something not present,
can't initialize something, or even this driver release depends
on something.
Most of these messages are harmless. You
see them because the kernel for the installation system is built to
run on computers with many different peripheral devices. Obviously, no
one computer will have every possible peripheral device, so the
operating system may emit a few complaints while it looks for
peripherals you don't own. You may also see the system pause for a
while. This happens when it is waiting for a device to respond, and
that device is not present on your system. If you find the time it
takes to boot the system unacceptably long, you can create a
custom kernel later (see Section 8.4, “Compiling a New Kernel”).

5.2.3. Bug Reporter

If you get through the initial boot phase but cannot complete the
install, the bug reporter menu choice may be helpful.
It copies system error logs and configuration information to a user-supplied
floppy.
This information may provide clues as to what went wrong and how to
fix it. If you are submitting a bug report you may want to attach
this information to the bug report.

Other pertinent installation messages may be found in
/var/log/ during the
installation, and /var/log/debian-installer/
after the computer has been booted into the installed system.

5.2.4. Submitting Installation Reports

If you still have problems, please submit an installation report. We also
encourage installation reports to be sent even if the installation is
successful, so that we can get as much information as possible on the largest
number of hardware configurations.

Please use this template when filling out
installation reports, and file the report as a bug report against the
installation-reports pseudo package, by sending it to
<submit@bugs.debian.org>.

In the bug report, describe what the problem is, including the last
visible kernel messages in the event of a kernel hang. Describe the
steps that you did which brought the system into the problem state.